How do I delegate and ask others for help without abdicating my responsibilities and without unfairly foisting something on them?
Is the level of assistance that you are asking for at which you differ based on the context (a personal friend, a co-worker, someone that you’re in a volunteer organization with, of the relationship)?

Not taking for granted how many people your parents had a positive impact on in their lives. Dad
died about 3 weeks ago. I was genuinely touched by the number of people who came to the wake and told our family how he had a positive impact on them.

Reconciling that I’m not learning some programming concepts as quickly as I had hoped and occasionally feeling that my feelings of imposter syndrome are valid? Prioritizing what to learn. Depending on the task at hand at work, it varies; a smattering of CSS, HTML, PHP, javascript, and SQL (and in that order).
(There’s a lot more code - like our wordpress theme - that I haven’t made public just yet).
Heck, I’m still using all ES5; should I go over to setting up the whole babel ecosystem (and frankly learn it, to be honest) (looking at the fetch library to retrieve JSON, so I’m considering it).

Watching:

The leaves falling

Kim’s Convenience

Listening:

The Flys - Got You (Where I Want You). (youtube video) The night before my wedding, one of my best friends, since grade school and I were catching up on our lives at a local bar. For context, Old Brooklyn isn’t really sexy or trendy. It’s not surburban like Applebee’s either. I was genuinely suprised that

Hearing that song in the background instantly brought me back to my adolescence. I’ve enjoyed the song but I couldn’t name the song or artist until then (thanks soundhound for identifying it). Finally identifying one of a song’s artist and title after not knowing for years is one of my favorite feelings. I’ve kept a playlist of these songs (spotify). Some of these songs are just ones where the title is not apparent in the lyrics, but I like more than others.

Serial, season 3; based in Cleveland.

Reading:

Metafilter. I’ve been a daily reader, although it’s not the same as before. Maybe its just my life experiences where what people write doesn’t seem so novel; also the rampant distrust of most institutions.

The Accessibility Interpretation Problem by Glenda Sims and Wilco Fiers. The best piece that I’ve read on web accessibility. How the guidelines for web accessibility are very subjective and subject to
intepretations; despite the initial impressions that it’s straight-forward and binary; there’s no “This site is accessible” badge or designation.

Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

Writing:

A web-standards guide for the library Although I write most of the code, the content and editing is done by co-workers and when I arrived, our practices of code and were either non-existent or unwritten.
Writing this out and determining how something like this should be written has been a fair amount of time and experimentation.

My secondary goal for georefencing these maps is to provide a web map layer for users to browse historic Cleveland at a high resolution detail (i.e. at zoom level 19-20).

Before I started this, my knowledge on georeferencing wasn’t much and I didn’t know what I’d use as the base map for my project - one that would provide viewers a sense of streets, intersections, and lack of sprawl in 1912…

Here’s what I learned and what I’m still trying to figure out:

The sources of paper maps:

CPL has Sanborn maps. Produced every few years in the early 20th century, Sanborns richly detail addresses, landuse, streets, rivers, buildings, and often times, property owners, of the entire city. Sometimes the buildings usage was also noted. In addition to their utility, they are relatively asthetically pleasing. They’re also available at an extremely fine scale, a scale of 200 feet per inch.

These maps were published as a bounded book of ‘plats’/’plates’ - pages - each roughly 15 by 10 inches of an arbitrary geographic area.

CPL also have “Hopkins Maps”, made by a different company, but same physical layout and map design.

As shown in the above image, there’s extraneous information (the map scale, the north arrow, the plate number) on each page that would need to be removed or clipped out if I wanted to present them
as one congruious map. The image in Cleveland Public Library’s digital gallery

If I wanted to create a contigous map, I had a fair amount of work ahead of me:

and I didn’t even know what order I should do these steps?!

So, how do I do this?!

I had multiple questions when I first started:

Do I stitch the plat(e)s together first and then georeference them? Or do I georeference first?

What tools do I use stitch them together? (stitch - creating them as if they appeared as one contiguous image)

How much accuracy should I get from them? Is 5 meter accuracy (from a reference layer) realistic? What if the original map had distortions in it in the first place?*

Would I be able to get results as accurate as than this GIF below? (Prospect Ave didn’t exist there at the old time, this is to primarily illustrate Carnegie Ave)

I spent an hour or so exploring our scanned maps to determine if there were any that, together would provide
enough coverage of the city of Cleveland. Some of their metadata and descriptions
our digital collections were misleading; this item has the title of Plat Book of Cuyahoga County, Ohio Complete in One Volume (Hopkins, 1914) but if you carefully read the title page of this book and view a couple adjacent pages of it, you learn that it’s just 1 of 4 volumes that are needed to have complete coverage of Cuyahoga County. Unfortunately, we didn’t even have all 4 volumes of the 1914 Hopkins available; so I couldn’t use that as a resource.

I then downloaded the geotiffs from mapwarper - now georeferenced that have the geographic projection stored within them - so they can be displayed over other modern maps.

Now I can open the geotiffs in QGIS as raster layers.
They matched up pretty well although not perfect (ADD screenshot) and I printed a portion out in QGIS’ print composer. And… You couldn’t read the street names on the printed copy. I learned that these image were scanned and uploaded as 72ppi and don’t print well.
Oops. Our library didn’t save the original loseless digital scans (they had since corrected this practice several years ago for other scanned maps).

72 PPI images are publicly available but we had 600PPI of these in private digital storage.

I asked Stephen Titchenal of railsandtrails.com - an underrated resource for rail maps of the 20th century; he’s digitized dozens of maps. He admitted he hadn’t stitched together any map as large as I was proposing but recommended photoshop and Panavue image assembler a since abandonwared windows stitcher but he hadn’t stitched together anything as large as I was proposing. Welp. Most of his maps were 300ppi and suitable.

Given my constraints: computing power on my work and personal computers (Thinkpad T450s, HP Z240 both with ubuntu) each no more than 16gb of ram); would I be able to work on 1 giant image
of all of the items stitched together? I tried gimp on ubuntu (to be fair it was a 600 PPI) and it was nearly unusable on a single image…

It wouldn’t be realistic to upload about 3gb of images to mapwarper.net…

So, readers, I’d love to hear your suggestions and thoughts.

I ask a few questions on how to proceed:

Given my two goals (a slippy web map and a print map of 24x36inch) would 300PPI be ok for both?

In which order should I complete the tasks of cropping/masking the plates, georeferencing the plates, and stitching them together to appear as one image?

After I georeference them, should CPL provide both georeferenced and non-georefenced items in our digial collection?

Tentatively, I think I’ll batch convert (with imagemagick) the images to 300PPI; then crop 1-2 plates of them in gimp (if it’s feasible from a memory standpoint), then try to georeference them in qgis.

For sharing georeferenced,
I can see both sides whether to add the georeferenced ones because georeferencing is never perfect; it’s always a work in progress.

I’d appreciate your advice for my next steps and what you’ve learned if you’ve done something similar (email is skorasaurus at gmail, the left bar has my social media contacts). I’ll share what I’ve learned later.

I gave a workshop/presentation on tools for map-making at Data Days CLE
on Friday. One of my favorite moments was the city employee who asked me about alternatives to
ARCGIS/ESRI and specifically being able to offer read access to geodatabases to other departments of data without using ESRI (hope I remember that correctly).

All of these simpler web map templates require a relatively minimal amount of data (not a very rigid rule, but I’d say less than a couple hundred points/features and that you don’t have a lot of properties on them). If you have more than this, you’ll need to upload them to one of the above services.

GDAL cheatsheet - GDAL is a geospatial library at the core of many geospatial applications; data conversion; reprojection;
analysis, and more.
Cheatsheet for using some of its command-line based tools.

If you want to start with the command line:
https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line

Highly recommended Books:
Interactive Data Visualization for the Web: An Introduction to Designing with D3 (2nd Edition) - Scott Murray - clearly written with examples; good not just for D3 as a refresher or extremely concise overview of html, css, and javascript.

GIS Cartography - Gretchen Peterson
Great design influence for making print and web-maps.